Raikkonen confident with new Ferrari F1 car

Kimi Raikkonen says he’s already found a confident feeling with Ferrari’s new SF71H Formula 1 car on the opening day of pre-season testing despite the challenging weather conditions.

The Finnish driver effectively ended his track running early as cold and wet weather closed in on Circuit de Catalunya during the final two hours of the first pre-season test day but still managed to notch up 80 laps without any reported technical issues.

Raikkonen, who ended the day third fastest on the times with a best lap of 1m 20.506s, says he’s pleased by the progress he’s made with Ferrari’s 2018 F1 car getting up to speed in unfamiliar surroundings.

“It’s a new car, for sure we expect it to be better, but it’s early days,” Raikkonen said. “There’s nothing wrong with the things we ran, but we need more days and hopefully we can do more running, but I’m confident.

“Obviously the weather is far from ideal, it’s very cold, so it has nothing to do with how we usually run the tyres or anything. We did the amount of running that we could, in these conditions, and everything felt, I would say normal.

“You still push like normal, but it has nothing to do with getting a lap time. It’s just to try to understand how things work, change a few things to see what happens.

“With the new cars you need to figure out what goes where, so we had no issues, but it’s early days. It’s tricky for everybody, difficult to make the tyres work, it was 8ºc or something like that so the main difficulty.”

Raikkonen will hand over to Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel for tomorrow’s pre-season test day before returning to action on Wednesday at the Spanish circuit.